Dissident Voice

October
7, 2000

(Published in the Sonoma County, CA Green Party
Voters Guide, Oct/Nov 2000)

Democratic Party presidential
contender Al Gore presents himself as a candidate sympathetic to issues of
importance for gays and lesbians. Indeed the endorsement of Gore by Human
Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay and lesbian advocacy group, would
appear to lend credibility to such an image. As often the case, however, image
is one thing, reality another.

A look at Gore’s record in Congress
can hardly lead one to the conclusion that Gore has been a defender of the
rights of gays and lesbians. During his 1976 run for the House of
Representatives, Gore referred to homosexuality as “abnormal sexual behavior.”
On July 22, 1980, Gore voted in favor of an amendment prohibiting the Legal
Services Corporation from providing assistance to homosexuals who were
discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. Just a month
earlier, Gore voted in favor of an amendment to prohibit legal assistance in
cases arising out of disputes over the issue of homosexuality or gay rights.

During his tenure in the
Senate, Gore locked arms with that noted champion of gay rights Senator Jesse
Helms, backing three anti-homosexual measures introduced by Helms. The first
was a 1986 amendment that overturned Washington DC’s law barring insurers from
refusing coverage to persons testing positive for HIV. Next, in 1977, Gore
supported Helms’ amendment requiring HIV testing for immigrants, which would
effectively prohibit HIV+ people from settling in the US. Third, in 1988 Gore
supported Helms’ amendment to the Fair Housing Bill, which would prevent the
Bill’s anti-discrimination section from protecting “an individual solely
because that individual is a transvestite.”

Senator Gore also supported
Helms’ Bill attacking the National Endowment for the Arts for its funding of
the controversial Mapplethorpe exhibit in 1989.

During the 1992 presidential
race, the gay and lesbian community was told that team Clinton/Gore was on
their side. What the new administration gave them instead was the highly flawed
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” policy. According to a 1999 study by the
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, in the five years following the
implementation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the number of gays and lesbians
ejected from the military increased by 86%. Women were disproportionately
affected by the policy: while female
officers made up 14% of the active duty force, they accounted for 28% of gay
discharges.

In a debate in New Hampshire
this past January, candidate Gore stated he would require that any appointees
to the Joint Chiefs of Staff fully support allowing gays to serve openly in the
military. In less than a month, however, Gore would backtrack from that
position. As the New York Times reported, “After an uproar from military
leaders, Mr. Gore reversed himself.”

For nearly a decade,
Bristol-Myers Squibb has held a monopoly over the life-sustaining drug Taxol.
Taxol is prescribed mostly to women suffering from breast and ovarian cancer,
and it is also used to treat AIDS patients with Karposa Sarcoma. The drug was
invented by the National Institute of Health in 1991, funded mostly by taxpayer
money, and then handed over to the pharmaceutical giant, who has since been
charging an outrageous price, far beyond what most people can afford.

The same story is true of
AZT, the first drug effective in slowing the development of AIDS. The research
and development of AZT as an AIDS combatant was funded primarily by the public.
Today, however, Burroughs-Wellcome commands a monopoly over this important
drug, and has driven up the annual price for AZT treatment to around $20,000.

The criminal giveaways of
the fruits of publicly funded research and development to private corporations
has accelerated during the Clinton-Gore years, as subsidy after subsidy has
been lavished upon Corporate America. The American public is the loser, paying
a heavy price for what it funded in the first place.

While election-year Gore
rails against large pharmaceutical companies, a recent article in Business
Week observes that “most industry reps in Washington dismiss his over
heated rhetoric as ‘phony populism’, according to one prominent drug-company
lobbyist.” This lobbyist points out the crucial fact that Gore “never talks
about price controls. He never suggests that he will do anything other than
make drugs available and affordable.”

This massive price-gouging
by pharmaceutical corporations is more than greedy; it’s deadly. One in four
South Africans is HIV+. The cost of a single series of treatments with
overpriced AIDS drugs far exceeds the yearly income of most South African
residents; the cost of treating the infected population would bankrupt the
nation. When the South African government appealed to the world for help
producing lower-priced generic equivalents to these drugs, the drug companies
threatened to sue them under World Trade Organization (WTO) regulations. Where
did Al Gore stand on this global humanitarian issue? Squarely behind the drug
companies, as he stated publicly early in his campaign.

Pharmaceutical giants such
as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, and Schering-Plough sponsored mega-dollar
events at the Democratic Convention. A Center for Responsive Politics survey
shows Gore has thus far received $87,350 from the pharmaceuticals industry for
the presidential campaign, while the Democratic Party has raised $2,671,778.
Joe Lieberman took in $91,150 from the industry for his 2000 Senate race. As Business
Week notes, “Lieberman in particular is a corporate money-raising
machine. In his past two Senate elections in Connecticut, he has accepted more
than $333,000 in political action committee gifts from two of [populist] Gore’s
top targets, the insurance and pharmaceutical industries – and has been their
frequent ally in legislative battles.”Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich
sums up Gore’s election year populism: “If you lined up the human species
according to populist inclination, [1896 Democratic Party champion] William
Jennings Bryan would be on one end. Al Gore might be on another.” “I don’t
recall a single issue on which the Vice-President has taken what might be
called a populist stance. Business should rest assured that if Al Gore is
elected, they will not have a populist at the helm.”

Is Al Gore really the man
who will stand up to companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb, cutting off their
umbilical cord to the public trough? On matters of importance to the homosexual
community generally, can Al Gore be trusted to deliver on his campaign promises
given his long and unsavory record as a Congressman, coupled with nearly eight
years of Clinton-Gore backsliding on election year promises?

In contrast Ralph Nader has
long been an opponent of such corporate welfare, and has been citing the Taxol
and AZT cases for years. Nader’s latest book, Cutting Corporate Welfare
(Seven Stories Press, 2000) lays out a detailed blueprint for ending corporate
welfare in its many guises.

Ralph Nader endorses the Green
Party platform, which is unequivocal in its support of“the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered people in housing, jobs, civil marriage and benefits, child
custody – and in all areas of life, the right to be treated equally with all other
people.”“We affirm the right to openly
embrace SEXUAL ORIENTATION in the intimate choice of who we love.”

Ralph Nader has applauded
the Vermont Supreme Court’s recent decision legalizing same-sex marriages:
"I think homosexuals have the right of civil union. There are economic
reasons for that and there are humanitarian reasons for that, and I think the
Vermont decision is a good one, and I think homosexuals should be given equal
rights and equal responsibilities."Nader also called the decision “a right, a humane and touching decision
with a very searching rationale -- it is not only a matter of affinity, but of
economics on health care and other issues, which makes it all the more needed.”

Clearly, a vote for Nader and the Green Party is a
vote for equal protection and equal responsibilities for gays, lesbians, and
transgendered people.